MUTUAL BENEFICENCE: LOCAL COMPANIES DISCOVER THE UNTAPPED POTENTIAL OF A FLEXIBLE, AT-HOME WORKFORCE.

• Author: Walter, Meg Morley
• Position: SILICON SLOPES

I was sitting next to Stephen Brown, cofounder of LedgerGurus, at a post-Tech Summit function. We were talking about the themes of the Summit and how multiple speakers had mentioned the need to include more women in the workforce. Then Stephen said, "I think sometimes we're missing a key point. You have to give women flexibility if you want to include them in the workforce." He mentioned the success his company has found by giving its employeesmany of them women--flexibility. I told him we should do a magazine story.

Because Utah has a lot of moms. Many of these moms are educated and hard working, but because the traditional job model requires 40 hours in a workplace (and because they choose to be home with their children), many feel that there is no place for them in the professional world. But we're in a time when technology allows teams to stay in contact regardless of their location and offers employees the capability to do nearly any type of work from home.

I'm a Utah mom who has benefited from flexibility and I have a fulfilling career as a mostly remote employee. Mine is not a perfect system. I live with a 3-year-old, so sometimes my day looks like that video of the dad getting interrupted by his kids on BBC on loop for 10 hours, and there's no one running in to wheel the kids away while I'm on a call. But on those days, I make up for lost time when my kids are in bed or early the next morning before they wake up. There's some adapting and some creativity necessary, but the job always gets done.

I understand that working from home on a flexible schedule is not something that does or could work for everyone. But it does and could work for many employees. And not just moms. Employees of all kinds can benefit from this model, as can their employers.

For this story I spoke to three different Utah companies that have chosen to employ a part-time, at-home workforce, many of these employees women, many of those women moms, and have found tremendous success in doing so.

LEDGERGURUS

Stephen and Brittany Brown--founders of the virtual, outsourced accounting firm LedgerGurus--employ accountants and bookkeepers who work from home. Their staff is paid hourly, but LedgerGurus does not dictate schedules or shifts. Instead, they assign each employee to a team, which is assigned customers, and ask their employees to take good care of those customers and deliver what they've committed. Employees work late at night, while their kids are at school or whenever they can carve out time, and use collaboration tools to stay connected to their teams and the entire company.

The Browns built their business specifically to allow talented and educated bookkeepers and accountants to work from home. "Our philosophy extends from my prior experience of going through the [BYU Accounting] program as a single mom and leaving to go out and do my own thing, then realizing that in the accounting world there was a lot of opportunity for moms to be a force in the workplace but very few companies were giving them that option," Brittany said. "And having come out of that experience as a single mom, I can really relate to somebody who really, really needed that to be an option and it wasn't there."

Brittany and Stephen knew that if they gave moms the flexibility to both be stay-at-home moms and have a career, they would find exceptional employees who would otherwise not be a part of the workforce. "What we saw were a lot of women like me...